Tagged: curves

Sunday sketch #278

On to something a bit different this week! No more wedges for awhile….

It’s back to curves! All drunkard’s path blocks again. Or are these quarter-circles? I have a feeling that the curves in drunkard’s path blocks don’t extend to the edges of the blocks, but I’ve never found a definitive description. Anyhoo, here we go.

I love this sorta teal blue / golden yellow combo. I discovered this cut-out lemon shape when tiling a completely different block, and decided to run with it. I love the secondary shapes that emerge… up top, there’s like a lacework of ‘D’ shapes going to and fro across the design. By just tweaking the direction of the lemons and the cut-outs in the negative space, the lace overlay becomes a series of alternating circles and squares. Can you see them?

The designs look just as good in the reverse colourway. (In the version on the left, I staggered the layout so the lemons sit in the corners.)

I can tweak the direction again, so the lace overlay becomes a series of new lemons, all facing perpendicularly to the dark blue lemons.

I love how much movement a single block with a few curves can give a design. And how many options there are for arranging blocks to create entirely new layouts.

These designs could be made using drunkard’s path blocks (or quarter-circle blocks) and squares. That’s it. I’ve only used two colours here, although obviously you could expand the palette. But with two colours, you’d just have to chain-piece your way through a bunch of curves and – voilà! – you’d have the prettiest quilt top. I really love this one (I know I say that all the time!); I really want to try making it!

Sunday sketch #275

Perhaps I stared too long at a clock this week, but I suddenly had an idea for a block featuring a circle cut in half and half again. (Or maybe I was inspired by last week’s split quarter-square triangle block.)

I imagined using some bright colours in the design, but instead settled on this dark green with an orange. I love the bright pop of colour against the murky background.

You can see if I rotate the circles, new secondary designs (squares) appear.

Or I can rotate the designs to create ’empty’ squares where the filled squares were.

Or just rotate randomly to create a bit of disorder. (Although if you look closely, you’ll see there is order here: the first and third rows are the same, as are the second and fourth rows. This makes each quadrant of 4 circles the same, too.)

This is just a single block in a 4 x 4 layout, surrounded by a wide border on all sides. It could be created in four quadrants, or perhaps one semicircle and two quadrants. There are lots more ways you can rotate the blocks, or use colour to create secondary designs. Endless fun!

Sunday sketch #269

I’ve talked before about how my design skills match my sewing skills. I tend to design things that I could make myself. Before I’d sewn curves, I didn’t design quilts with curves. Until I could sew a partial seam confidently, I rarely designed quilts that needed them. I’ve never sewn a Y-seam (I know!), and I don’t think I’ve ever designed a quilt that uses them. When my sewing skills develop, so too do my design skills.

But occasionally I’ll play around with EQ8 and end up with a design that I know is beyond my capabilities as a quilter. It might be too complicated, or technical, or just impossible to piece in a straightforward way. I tend not to post these designs, because they never excite me as much as designs I know I could make. Maybe it’s because I don’t work on those designs as much, or iterate them to the point where they might excite me… as soon as I think “I don’t know how I’d make this”, I lose interest. But I save them (I save everything!), cos who knows what might happen in the future?

Well… let me tell you! You might take a class with Jenny Haynes of Papper, Sax, Sten on skinny inset strips, and realise that designs you’ve previously binned in the Too Hard Basket suddenly become absolutely achievable. Here’s one such design.

I’ve done a few series of sketches featuring thin black borders and outlines (see Sunday sketches #203, #204 and #205, and #225, #226 and #227). But in most cases, they’re straight lines (relatively easy to piece) or circular curves that are wide enough to piece (say 1/2″ to 1″ wide).

In this design, the lines are much thinner (1/8″) and curvy and overlapping and I knew just from looking at them that I could/would never make a quilt like this. The potential for inaccuracy and subpar results would annoy me too much. But I really like the design – it’s very Art Nouveau, and reminds me a little of artwork from William Morris (without the flowers) or Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Here are a few more versions.

The previous designs are an 8×8 arrangement of a single block that’s alternately rotated by 180 degrees. There’s also vertical and horizontal sashing (also 1/8″ wide) between the blocks. The next design is all that but without the horizontal sashing.

With so many elements, there are lots of ways to arrange the blocks and use colour to highlight different shapes. Here they are without the sashing.

You can also add colours. I tried this next design in peach, but it looks a little… umm… intestinal haha. All those fleshy bendy bits!

And back to the version with sashing, featuring 3 colours (plus black)…

…or a different arrangement of colours…

And that layout with only vertical sashing…

…so, there are lots of options.

And after taking Jenny’s online class, skinny curves like this now seem totally manageable. You can see a pic on my Instagram of the first skinny inset strip that I sewed during the workshop. How good is that?! It was much less complicated than I was expecting, and really quick and easy. (I’m not being paid to say this haha, I just really enjoyed the class and am excited at the idea of incorporating skinny inset strips into future designs.)

So now that I’ve expanded my sewing skills a smidge, I’ll feel more confident incorporating skinny inset curves into my designs. Yay!